World AIDS Day 2017: a reading list

Today is World AIDS Day, and while your news feeds are streaming with guilty pleas and tax bills, we want to make sure that some important perspectives and reports on the US and Global status of HIV/AIDS make it to your reading list today. Below, we’ve compiled just a few suggested readings that have been published in the week leading up to World AIDS Day 2017. Feel free to follow the links now, or bookmark our page for coming back to when the dust has settled in DC.

Why it’s worth a read: “And yet African Americans are still most affected by the virus. [African Americans] are still being diagnosed at higher rates and dying at higher rates than any other community, especially young, black gay and bisexual men. […] We polled a bevy of AIDS activists and asked them, if they could address one thing in ending HIV and AIDS moving forward, what would it be? In short, “Where do we go from here?”

Why it’s worth the read: “This ONE Campaign report reveals how cutting U.S.-supported treatment and prevention efforts through PEPFAR and the Global Fund now could squander 15 years’ worth of investment and could trigger a massive resurgence of the global epidemic.”

Why it’s worth a read: “’What is frustrating is that people only think about the issue for just one day, then go on to something else,’ he says. ‘Someone will give us a $50 check on World AIDS Day and think that they saved the world … until another World AIDS Day comes along.’”

Why it’s worth the read: “What is troubling is that the ‘End of AIDS’ discourse [with its shift to privatized, technological and cost-effective interventions] has managed to discredit and open the door to de-funding the very interventions and investments that have the potential to make treatment and prevention more successful. This includes interventions rooted in health systems strengthening, community-based provision, and an embrace of the right to health, as well as those which attend to the broader social inequities and socioeconomic constraints that threaten the success of solely biomedical interventions.”